Shopping mall

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For the traditional meaning of the word "mall", see pedestrian street or promenade.
McArthur Glen Designer Outlet, Swindon, England, a shopping mall built within a disused railway engine works. The grey girders are the original structure of the works.
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McArthur Glen Designer Outlet, Swindon, England, a shopping mall built within a disused railway engine works. The grey girders are the original structure of the works.

A shopping mall (or simply mall), shopping center, or shopping arcade is a building or set of buildings that contain stores, with interconnecting walkways enabling visitors to easily walk from store to store. The walkways may be enclosed.

In the British Isles and Australia, shopping malls are more usually referred to as shopping centres or, sometimes, shopping arcades. In North America, the term shopping mall is usually applied to enclosed retail structures, while shopping center refers to open-air retail complexes.

Strip malls are a recent development, corresponding to the rise of suburban living in the United States after World War II. As such, the strip mall development has been the subject of the same criticisms leveled against suburbanization and suburban sprawl in general. In the United Kingdom these are called retail parks or out-of-town shopping centres.

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[edit] History

Indoor multi-vendor shopping is not a recent idea. Isfahan's Grand Bazaar, which is largely covered, dates from the 10th century A.D. The 10 kilometer long covered Tehran's Grand Bazaar also has a very old history. The Grand Bazaar of Istanbul was built in 15th century and is still one of the largest covered markets in the world with more than 58 streets and 4000 shops. The Oxford Covered Market in Oxford, England was officially opened on 1 November 1774 and is still going strong today. The Burlington Arcade in London was opened in 1819. The Arcade in Providence, Rhode Island introduced the concept to the United States in 1828. The Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan, Italy followed in the 1860s and is closer to large modern malls in spaciousness. Many other large cities created arcades and shopping centers in the late 19th century and early 20th century, including the Cleveland Arcade and GUM in Moscow in 1890. Early shopping centers designed for the automobile include Market Square, Lake Forest, Illinois (1916) and Country Club Plaza, Kansas City, Missouri (1924).

An example of the mid-19th-century shopping mall: The Passage in St Petersburg.
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An example of the mid-19th-century shopping mall: The Passage in St Petersburg.

In the mid-20th century, with the rise of the suburb and automobile culture in the United States, a new style of shopping center was created away from city centers. The concept was pioneered by the Austrian-born architect Victor Gruen. The new generation called malls included Northgate Mall, built in north Seattle, Washington, USA in 1950, Gruen's Northland Shopping Center, built near Detroit, Michigan, USA in 1954, and the Southdale Center, the first fully enclosed mall, which opened in the Twin Cities suburb of Edina, Minnesota, USA in 1956. In the UK, Chrisp Street Market was the first pedestrian shopping area built with a road at the shop fronts.

A very large shopping mall is sometimes called a megamall. The title of the largest enclosed shopping mall was held by the West Edmonton Mall in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada for 20 years. One of the world's largest shopping complexes at one location is the two-mall agglomeration of the Plaza at King of Prussia and the Court at King of Prussia in the Philadelphia suburb of King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, USA. The King of Prussia mall has the most shopping per square foot in the US. Comparable in size is Europe's largest shopping center, Dundrum Town Centre in Dundrum, Dublin, Ireland. The most visited shopping mall in the world and largest mall in the United States is the Mall of America, located near the Twin Cities in Bloomington, Minnesota, USA. However, several Asian malls are advertised as having more visitors, including Taman Anggrek Mal, Kelapa Gading Mall and Megamal Pluit, all in Jakarta-Indonesia,Berjaya Times Square in Malaysia and SM Megamall in the Philippines..

The race is on to build the largest mall. Beijing's Golden Resources Shopping Mall, opened in October 2004, is the world's largest, at 600,000 m² (approximately 6 million square feet). Berjaya Times Square in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, is advertised at 700,000 m². SM Mall of Asia in the Philippines, opened in May 2006, is the world's third largest at 386,000 square meters of gross floor area with further expansions still ongoing. The Mall of Arabia inside Dubai Land in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, which will open in 2006, will become the largest mall in the world, at 929,000 square meters (10 million sq. feet).

"Pitt Street Mall" of Sydney is Australia's busiest shopping precinct. This mall has eight retail centres and more than 600 speciality stores, within two city blocks.
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"Pitt Street Mall" of Sydney is Australia's busiest shopping precinct. This mall has eight retail centres and more than 600 speciality stores, within two city blocks.

Mall can refer to a shopping mall, which is a place where a collection of shops all adjoin a pedestrian area, or an exclusively pedestrian street, that allows shoppers to walk without interference from vehicle traffic. Mall is generally used in North America and Australasia to refer to large shopping areas, while the term arcade is more often used, especially in Britain, to refer to a narrow pedestrian-only street, often covered or between closely spaced buildings. A larger, often only partly covered but exclusively pedestrian shopping area is in Britain also termed a shopping precinct or pedestrian precinct. The majority of British shopping centers are in town centers, usually inserted into old shopping districts, and surrounding by subsidiary open air shopping streets. A number of large out-of-town "regional malls" such as Meadowhall were built in the 1980s and 1990s, but there are only ten of them or so and current planning regulations prohibit the construction of any more. Out-of-town shopping developments in the UK are now focused on retail parks, which consist of groups of warehouse style shops with individual entrances from outdoors. Planning policy prioritizes the development of existing town centres, although with patchy success.

[edit] Regional mall

Cevahir Mall, Turkey, seen here with its six floors.
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Cevahir Mall, Turkey, seen here with its six floors.

A regional mall is a shopping mall which is designed to service a larger area than a conventional shopping mall. As such, it is typically larger, and offers a wider selection of stores. Given its wider service area, these malls tend to have higher-end stores that need a larger area in order for their services to be profitable. Regional malls are also found as tourist attractions in vacation areas.

Super-regional malls are usually shopping centers with over 1 million square feet of retail space, and which serve as the dominant shopping venue for the region in which they are located.

In many cases, regional and super-regional malls exist as parts of large superstructures which often also include office space, residential space, amusement parks and so forth. This trend can be seen in the construction and design of many modern supermalls such as Cevahir Mall in Turkey.

[edit] Dead malls and new trends

Main article: Dead mall

In the U.S, in recent times, as more modern facilities are built, many early malls have become largely abandoned, due to decreased traffic and tenancy. These deteriorating "dead malls" have failed to attract new business and often sit unused for many years until restored or demolished. Interesting examples of architecture and urban design, these structures often attract people who explore and photograph them. Until the mid-1990s, the trend was to build enclosed malls and to renovate older outdoor malls into enclosed ones. Such malls had advantages such as temperature control. Since then, the trend has turned. It is once again fashionable to build open-air malls, and some enclosed malls have been opened up, such as the Sherman Oaks Galleria. In addition, some malls, when replacing an empty anchor location, have replaced the former anchor store building with the more modern outdoor design, leaving the remainder of the indoor mall intact, such as the Del Amo Fashion Center in Torrance, California.

In parts of Canada, it is now rare for new shopping malls to be built, as outdoor outlet malls or big box shopping areas known as power centres are now favored, although the traditional enclosed shopping mall is still much in demand by those seeking weather-protected, all-under-one-roof shopping. In addition the underground interconnections between downtown multi story shopping malls continue to grow in the Underground city of Montreal and the PATH system of Toronto, reaching a total of 32 km of shop-lined pedestrian passages in Montreal and 27 km in Toronto. The numbers do not include the passages inside the many subway stations which also interconnect with the commercial areas.

[edit] Legal issues

One controversial aspect of malls has been their effective displacement of traditional main streets. Many consumers prefer malls, with their spacious parking garages, well-maintained walkways, and private security guards, over public streets, which often suffer from limited parking, poor maintenance, and limited police coverage. [citation needed]

The Mall, an out-of-town shopping centre at Patchway, near Bristol, England. Escalators connect the upper and lower levels.
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The Mall, an out-of-town shopping centre at Patchway, near Bristol, England. Escalators connect the upper and lower levels.

In response, a few jurisdictions, notably California, have expanded the right of freedom of speech to ensure that speakers will be able to reach consumers who prefer to shop within the boundaries of privately owned malls.[1] See Pruneyard Shopping Center.

[edit] See also

[edit] Types of shopping facilities

[edit] Components of shopping facilities

[edit] Shopping property management firms

[edit] Planning concepts

[edit] References

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Judd, Dennis R. (1995) "The Rise of the New Walled Cities" in Liggett, Helen and Perr, David C. (eds.), Spatial Practices, Sage, Thousand Oaks, pp. 144-168.

[edit] External links

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